


her branches reach for me

by aerynlallaboso



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, The Month of Void 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:01:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8242171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: Hell is a lush, verdant haven in the middle of nothingness.





	

**Author's Note:**

> short piece i worked up for month of void 2016 (week 2)! i'm glad dh fandom has such cool events and i hope yall like this >:)

Hell is a lush, verdant haven in the middle of nothingness.

 

It is nothing like the fire and brimstone popular authors paint it as, nor is it the endless expanse of pale grey the Abbey occasionally speaks of. The grass springs green and dew-specked underfoot here; trees stretch up into an unfathomably black sky, their limbs eagerly seeking the darkness as if it were sunlight. Ruins of blue-grey stone intrude upon the foliage, intertwine with it to form the stage for a play that will never be completed. An altar lies in the centre, put up to a god who will never come.

 

Smaller islands surround the picturesque scene on this central one. Some are carpeted with green, others with cobblestone, and none are more than ten, twenty steps across. There is nothing on them, not a statue or a painting like the one on the main island, which sits on its easel and stares. It was supposed to be a portrait of a child, painted with love and care and a shivering, vicious anticipation. Instead, it is a portrait of this place. This place which is a hundred and three steps around, a hundred steps across - she knows it exactly.

 

There is nothing left to her but counting and walking, and reflecting. Upon your loss, the painting seems to say to her. Upon a brief obstacle, Delilah corrects it. You cannot think I will allow myself to remain here for all of eternity.

 

Already she has no idea how long she has been here, walking. Her feet were moving when she landed, clad in shoes like those she wore in the tower kitchens - those she  _ hated _ wearing - and they have not stopped since. They never tire, though the shoes pinch. It is the mildest of hells, the most gentle of prisons, to be trapped in perpetual motion around a beautiful garden that does not exist, but to a woman who has spent hours of her life poised with unnatural stillness before an easel, contemplating her next stroke, it is  _ torture. _

 

Sometimes she wishes Daud had just run her through. That would’ve been easier to come back from.

 

She looks up as she walks - the unbridled use of her eyes is not lost to her - and observes the rippling sky. It is the only thing which changes here; she fancies the Outsider is looking through at her, looking down on her, though she knows he isn’t. He would bore of this place even faster than she has. Odd how a former sanctuary can inspire such feelings of disgust.

 

The painting passes her by, her footsteps soft on the lawns before it. It is a mirror of the world around her, a painting inside a painting inside a painting. She looks away from it.

 

Next time. She has it all planned out. Delilah has had plenty of time to think in here. She spent days howling her rage at the sky, the trees, screaming the names of the Outsider and his dog and Jessamine and her father, who threw her out of Dunwall Tower for a simple prank when she was a  _ child _ -

 

_ “The Imperial Princess would never be privy to such a disgraceful exposure of Lord Barnaby’s private matters, I am sure. Nonetheless, he has demanded satisfaction, and I am obliged to give it to him. From this day forward your employment at Dunwall Tower is terminated.” _

_ “But, your Majesty, my daughter wouldn’t do such a thing, and I - I can’t find another job after this, I have to feed her-” _

 

_ “From this day forward, Mrs Copperspoon.” _

 

An illegitimate sister to Jessamine. She swills the name Delilah Kaldwin around on her tongue, and likes the sound of it. A knife in the gut of Jessamine and her father and daughter all at once. All she has to do is ascend from hell itself and get past the devil.

 

The sky darkens, like he heard her.

 

“You gave me this power,” Delilah says aloud. Her feet slow, almost stop. “You had no right to dictate what I do with it or to send your hound at me. Or were you actually  _ afraid  _ of me?”

 

The thought makes her grin, the skin over her high cheekbones stretching to show her hollow cheeks. Hell provides no food or drink but keeps her alive regardless, alive to walk this island’s twenty steps and brew a cauldron’s worth of hatred. Not for the first time, she considers what might have happened had there been a different painting here. 

 

She takes her last step on this island, vanishes from reality and reappears on the next island. Would she be trapped in that in-between room in the Brigmore Manor instead? Would she be a different person - Billie Lurk perhaps, or that fool Timsh? If it had been Daud himself - she could have gotten inside his head and torn off his skin with his own hands. It would’ve been worth it.

 

_ “Your genius couldn’t keep me from reaching you. It won’t save you now.” _

 

Delilah says into the Void, “They’ll come for me. My coven are nothing without me. Even now the thorns will be growing inside them without me to stop it.” She clenches her fists, bites her tongue and lets the blood trickle across her lips. “It will be soon,  _ Daud _ .”

 

And just like that-

 

Her blood hits the grass. A single drop, and her feet stop short in their path. Delilah’s breath hitches.

 

Across the ground, a red tide sweeps, like leaves going maroon and falling in autumn. She can see it starting on the smaller islands, too, from the outside inward. It is drawn irresistibly to the centre of hell - the painting, and after a brief stumble Delilah is walking freely towards the painting too. She stops to tear off her pinching shoes and hurl them into the Void.

 

The red bleeds up the easel and to the frame of the painting, tarnishing the pale gold. Tendrils reach towards the image itself. In the very centre of the painting, over the central tree, the red takes root, swelling and bursting from the canvas into a shape that sends the rest of Delilah’s blood tingling.

 

A single rose. Heavy with dew, thorned, blood-red, and singing like a rune.

 

Delilah laughs. “You see?” she says. “You  _ see _ ?” and she is saying it to all of them, everyone who ever thought the scullery maid’s daughter and the baker’s apprentice and the flowered witch would never catch up to them, would never hold more power than the lowliest sewer rat.

 

The rose grows, reaching towards her. She grabs it by the stem and lets the thorns dig into her, her blood running towards the flower’s roots - a voice rings in her ears.  _ Delilah, Delilah, Delilah. A second chance. Your time has come, and with luck and skill, it need never end ever again. _

 

She stumbles forward, and she is still in hell, and for a moment her stomach lurches, her top lip curling back in a snarl - but this is not hell as it was five minutes ago. The grass under her bare feet is soft and green, not tinted reddish. Everything in this place glistens with her power, from the top of the tree in front of her to the stone ruins to the exquisitely carved white statues of herself that she can feel in every direction, and Delilah turns from the painting and runs for the stone path that leads to nowhere.

 

Her feet hurt where they hit the cobblestone, the phantom ache of pinching shoes. Her hands hurt because she is still holding the rose. She launches herself off the stone path into the Void, feeling nothing as she falls except a fervent hope, not even wind resistance, falling and falling and-

 

Landing on the rotted timber floorboards of Brigmore Manor.

 

Delilah crushes the stem of the rose in her hand and lets the plant’s flesh fall to the floor, mixing with her blood. “How about that,” she says to the empty room, to the lower studio which is overgrown with plants in a manner that suggests she has been gone years, even a decade. It is no matter. With the Mark on her hand, she already has the power to kill Empresses, to topple empires. To topple the Kaldwins.

  
She grins.


End file.
